🔭🔬🧪 A Quick Q&A on federal R&D with ... Matt Hourihan of the Federation of American Scientists
Why is Washington so stingy with science funding?
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Q&A
🔭🔬🧪 A Quick Q&A on federal R&D funding with ... Matt Hourihan of Federation of American Scientists
A key element of the pro-growth, Up Wing policy agenda outlined in my book, The Conservative Futurist, is a massive increase in all forms of science and technology research. And that includes spending by the federal government. Returning to the Space Age level of two percent of GDP from 0.7 percent today would be a good start. (In dollar terms, that would come out to around $500 billion.) Now President Biden wants to boost R&D, but Congress won’t fork over all as much as Biden wants — much less as much as I would prefer. As the American Institute of Physics notes:
Lofty rhetoric from lawmakers about increasing science spending met the hard reality of budget caps this year, with Congress cutting most science agencies in its final appropriations for fiscal year 2024. The numbers are set through two packages of legislation, the first signed into law on March 9 and the second on March 23. Among the hardest hit agencies is the National Science Foundation, whose budget is shrinking 8% to $9.06 billion. The cut reverses much of the 12% increase that Congress provided NSF last year using a special supplementary appropriation.
Congress framed that $1 billion supplement as a downpayment on the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, which proposed rapidly expanding NSF as well as the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. But the supplement ultimately was a maneuver to evade budget limits negotiated for that year, and Congress was unwilling to make the same move this year. NIST also received one of the largest cuts in percentage terms across science agencies, dropping 8% to $1.16 billion. This rolls back about half of the 18% increase Congress provided NIST for the previous fiscal year.
For more on what’s happening with federal science funding, I asked a few questions of Matt Hourihan, associate director of R&D and Advanced Industry with the Federation of American Scientists, where he focuses on R&D investment policy, novel research models, and energy and space innovation.
1/ Pethokoukis: Why is Congress not fully funding the R&D authorizations, and to what degree are both Rs and Ds at fault?
Hourihan: R&D funding is part of the annual funding mix and subject to the same budget limits as everyone else. When you have something like the Fiscal Responsibility Act in place that severely limits discretionary spending, that's going to limit how much you can invest in science and critical technology. Maybe that's how the fiscal hawks want it, but it's not good for the country. On the other hand, Democrats also had a chance to do a little more for early-stage R&D in the big legislation they adopted earlier in the Biden term, and they didn't.
2/ Given China’s public technology ambitions, how is science funding not a priority for both sides?
There are fantastic champions on both sides of the aisle, but it's hard for science and innovation to rise to the top in light of plenty of competing priorities. This is probably due to a mix of reasons. Sometimes there's a failure to adequately connect the dots between investments in science and societal outcomes, since there can be time lags. Certainly constituents matter, and their short-term needs might be different — if a legislator doesn't have a lab or university or research institute in their district, it might be less immediately obvious how investing in research might help their constituents. Science investment might not be the first tool that comes to mind to solve public challenges. And this is not a partisan thing either.
Science and technology is at the core of every major bipartisan public priority.
3/ Might we “catch up” at some point to the original authorized funding levels? Is there a case for optimism?
FY 2025 is shaping up to be another poor year, and if so we'd be looking at a more than $8 billion gap between targets and actual funding, which will only grow as the FY 2026 targets rise. I don't think it's realistic at this point for Congress to fully remedy the situation through regular appropriations, though, depending on how things shake out in the election, we could see some progress. It might take an alternate path to get these investments done — one-time supplemental or mandatory spending for critical tech R&D, say. But this is all long odds.
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